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Scenario: A Network of Arcologies
Randomness is another name for the mysterious ordering processes that affect all artistic creativity." Thomas Berry Sacred Arcology Visualization Focus on the healing, calming, and holistic energy within each of us as we begin to raise each other up from the dead epoch of nationalism and artificial borders of all kinds. Visualize biogregions taking shape around natural borders such as micro-climates, waterways, deserts, plains, and mountain ranges. Get in touch with the bioregion closest to you. Connect with its particular landscape and its climate: the trees and plants, streams, rivers, lakes, the edges of the sea flowing through your veins. Tune into the indigenous species and local cultures. Hear the sounds of nature as you connect with wilderness. Fly over the countryside with the eyes of an eagle. As you fly over agricultural areas noticed the land has been divided into squares of corporate farming. There are very few wilderness areas surviving and each of them has become small islands surrounded by urban sprawl. The home ranges of wild creatures are severed by highways and sprawling subdivisions, oil and gas projects, and industrial forestry and mining that have no regard for sustainable economic and agricultural practices. As the human population increases, notice backcountry areas are now threatened for sensitive wildlife by recreational activity. Hover over the Mexican/American border of Arizona and see the border fence, the security lights, and the noise from aircraft patrol vehicles as a major threat to wildlife movement making it impossible for jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, Mexican wolves, and pronghorn to return to their home ranges. Now visualize saving wildlife by linkages along the spine of the continent, corridors of connected natural habitat where large roaming animals are free to migrate. Tunnels underneath highways allow animals to safely cross on their migratory journeys. After viewing the national border, fly to a metropolitan area in your bioregion and land. It might take you a while since some metropolitan areas are one hundred miles long. But there is no longer business as usual. A social transformation is occurring consciously evolving us to a new social paradigm founded on ecocity principles. You are a witness to the toxic, overpopulated, car congested, fast food, crime infested, oil and drug addicted dinosaur cities of Western Civilization blossoming into ecocities designed to create a pedestrian, three-dimensional network of arcologies for people, not automobiles. The goal of these ecocities is to foster full human potential, protect the environment, and eliminate the causes of class warfare and imperial conquest by bringing us back to our true spiritual, creative, and cosmic order. Wilderness areas expand as sprawl is rolled back to reasonable limits as existing cities are remodeled for foot traffic, bicycles, and renewable energy transit systems. By shifting population density to pedestrian/transit centers, people can walk, bike, or have a short transit ride to all the places they need to go to create a meaningful life. Housing and work, commercial areas, places to socialize, ecological industries, warehousing, education, recreational activities, promenades, and even agricultural areas will be in close proximity. Within a metropolis there will be a number of different pedestrian cores of walkable centers connected to each other by public transits, like light rail, and bicycles. For traveling longer distances, there will be the transit. In cases of emergency, cars will be for use or rent. Most manufactured and electronic goods are rented allowing one to easily return items when they break down or for upgrades. We turn from an economy based on ownership to an economy of users who fairly share natural resources. An ecocity is designed to create opportunities for face-to-face interactions and spontaneous meetings that was impossible to arrange in the car-centered culture. Spots for social gatherings in downtown centers have beautiful pools and fountains, public art, and fruit and nut trees and other permaculture gardens. On top of tall buildings are rooftop arboretums. Bridges built between buildings interlink public and natural spaces. Natural areas, waterways, and nature paths are restored. Some parking lots become community organic gardens when the concrete is removed and the soil renewed. Within green belt areas, open spaces allow for the reintroduction of indigenous species. Terraces and rooftop gardens are designed to help bird species and other local species to come back and thrive. Suburban neighborhood centers are formed creating car-free zones. Health clinics, computer and science labs, art studios, gyms, and libraries are free in inspiring neighborhood community centers of life-long learning. Intersections of streets become compost and information centers. Now you can clearly see different types of landscapes emerging from the chaotic urban sprawl. There are landscapes of ecocities and ecovillages designed around walkable centers, and landscapes that support human industry such as mining, forest production, agriculture, fish farming, and manufacturing. But there is a very different value system at work than at the time when Western Civilization dominated the world developmental model with practices that destroyed the surrounding landscapes. Now a revolutionary philosophy called cradle-to-cradle design is applied to all industry and building projects. Cradle-to-cradle design framework is based on nature's design principles to create materials and industries that are regenerative and create healthy environments. They are not only sustainable but sustaining. Working with nature rather than dominating over nature as in the cradle-to-grave paradigm that has caused vast world-wide pollution, poverty, and waste, it celebrates the interdependence of life. In the cradle-to-cradle paradigm there is no waste. As in nature as with the human world, waste equals food; like trees, cradle-to-cradle design uses currents of solar income, and like all healthy ecosystems, it honors diversity. This holistic approach to design uses scientific knowledge as a critical element in the design process, a true design/science revolution where chemicals and materials are made for perpetual recyclability. In this paradigm, water that goes through industrial processes is cleaner when it is discharged from industries than before it is used. With the heroic spirit of saving the biosphere in the air, the spirit of the age is liberated. As dangerous effects of climate change due to a century of burning of fossil fuels are undeniable, people feel and are educated to the urgency of the immediate need to radically change their lifestyle. They see it as their duty to humanity to move into high-density, car-free housing districts of mix-use ecocity zoning principles. Matriotism, a reverence and loyalty toward Planet Earth is taking over from the old patriotic urges that only think about the welfare of one's nation-state. Peace is in the air as nuclear weapons around the world are being dismantled. Work flex hours allow everyone to work for 20 hours or less per week in maintenance, construction, and service jobs within the context of an ecocity framework. The cradle-to-cradle economy based on solar power requires the creation of jobs that develop solar technologies, construction of mixed-use buildings, remodeling old buildings with ecological materials, building greenhouses, farming rooftop and organic permaculture gardens. Other time throughout the week is devoted to inner work, bodywork, education, and community and spiritual development in the context of finding one's true role within the arcology model. Every part of life is accounted for in the care-based economy such as housework, childcare, elderly care, artwork and scholarship. A new kind of global currency is evolving based on wealth defined as something that fosters the health of the planet. No one can own the health of the planet; rather everyone benefits from a healthy planetary ecology and needs to share in the responsibility for its maintenance. Individuals don't own natural resources, they share them. Instead of a Gross National Product Indicator of the health of the economy, there is a Quality of Life indicator which indicates the general welfare and happiness of the people. See all the human and natural resources of the world being accounted for and redistributed from an Earth Bank accounting system, being fed the data it needs to function through the Internet, forming an open-source ecological economy. Finally we are living as one family united to save our precious life-support systems on Earth! Now, visualize the military budgets of the world shrinking as we begin focusing on the real needs of our times, love in action-lovolution-- solving homelessness, unemployment, starvation, illiteracy, polluted resources, poverty, deforestation, and crime as money that was going for trillion dollar military budgets are now going into constructing ecological cities. As we focus our creative energy on the internalization of constructing arcology-putting our own "house" in order--the external fears that resulted in nuclear arms races, cease to exist. Youth spend time in a Global to Local Service Corp rather than being recruited to fight in nationalistic foreign wars for oil. Phase one of the great transformation is remodeling old cities by making pedestrian centers and phasing out automobile use. The second phase is building entirely new cities, or arcologies on Earth, and eventually into Outer Space--energized by the power of the sun, perhaps even beamed down in the form of microwaves from solar powered satellites. As national borders are torn down and walls crumble, feel the energy circulating around the planet using a world energy grid. Visualize conserving the ecology by living in a new communal design with nature that fuses technology with evolutionary architecture. Wild animals are now free to roam again as people live in compact cities and use a much smaller proportion of the Earth. By thinking in terms of what is good for the total environment and total humanity, theUrban Effect takes effect as we birth arcology into existence, becoming one harmonized organism. Arcology, a whole-city container for a new moral order of the parts within the whole, creates a more efficient complexity than could be conceived within the context of urban sprawl. It miniaturizes our habitat by imploding the metropolis. Arcology is understood as a miniature universe, a multi-level, multi-dimensional, transcultural structure that interiorises Gaia by absorbing planetary consciousness. High-density interaction allows for more synthesis of knowledge, more interacting and interweaving of elements creating more consciousness than ever before. Through our constant connection with each other and nature, our spiritual evolution accelerates. We begin to understand our collective purpose of being the stewards of life on Earth and our sacred human destiny of being the carriers of love into Outer Space. We recognized arcology in all its diverse forms to fit into specific geophysical conditions, as the actualisation of the aesthetic transfiguration of the earth, "the compassionate melding of matter into the aesthetic." Artistic considerations and aesthetic values take precedence over material concerns. Never again will the importance of beautiful design be forsaken for "practicality" because beauty is a necessary ingredient for survival! This process is called aesthetogenesis : the transfiguration of the universe from an "entropic, indifferent, rational, protohuman cosmos into one that is aesthetic, compassionate, and ultimately ultra human: a universe of pure spirit." Arcologies become places where new forms of consciousness and spirituality emerge. Through arcology, we become Gaia knowing itself and s/he has the potential of reproducing biospheres of technological galactic gardens throughout our loving Cosmos. Feel this vision being absorbed into every cell into our body as it opens up parts of your brain that have lied dormant for centuries. Allow the vision to rush up your spine like a water fountain of light illuminating your heart charka and gushing out the crown charka of your divine head. See these rays of energy uniting with others who cells have absorbed this visionary blueprint as the blissful energy dances in spirals with the output of the light waves of other's divine brains. As more and more people discover the arcology within, the more it becomes our collective reality. Embrace the arcology of the Goddess, the Queendom within you yearning for materialization. Focus on your breath and as you breath let the air carry the vision into your cells, seeking deeper and deeper into the blood stream of life, leading you to crystallize peaceful arcologies of the people's ever evolving wisdom in your mind's eye. Category:Scenario